Because DNA is related to modern genealogy research, I am posting this here.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the police can collect your DNA from places you have been, not the crime scene, without a warrant.
I got this from Dick Eastman’s genealogy blog.
Most fee-based genealogy sites have free weeks or weekends around different holidays throughout the year.
Memorial Day many sites give free access to their military related records.
It depends on the site which holidays, if any, and which records they grant free access to.
Some sites may require a sign up for their limited free offerings, such as Ancestry.com. This is the one I am most familiar with, but I have received emails from several other services.
I am not paying for access to genealogy data until I can have both the time and the money to make it worthwhile.
If you are not busy with activities with family and friends and have the weekend off, you may find some things that will help you expand your search.
Note taking in genealogical research serves multiple purposes.
All of the notes we take must be clear and to the point and must be legible when we return to them at some point in the future.
I have a terrible habit from years of note-taking in college and grad school of writing so fast that I can’t read it later. That’s why doctors have such bad handwriting. They have muscle memory of writing that way and it is too easy to keep at it. It takes conscious effort to unlearn that. The advent of easy access to computers has kept me from overcoming that issue.
It is now harder to get information because of the “War on Terror” and subsequent laws.
May states now limit how far back and how easily you can get records for family members. If you don’t have birth and death certificates for your parents, grandparents, etc., you now have more hoops to go through to get them if they were born less than 100 years ago. The argument is that the terrorists will use the SSN’s of deceased people to get fake ID’s. However, if the agencies that issue ID’s will run a check of a SSN against the SSDI you either catch fraud or a very rare instance of someone whose SSN shows they are dead.
The SSDI, the Social Security Death Index, is another example. Because agencies that are supposed to look at the SSDI to see which Social Security Numbers are for people who are now deceased and don’t it is now blocked from free access for some websites. This got a lot of attention a few years ago when a criminal used a dead baby’s SSN to make a false tax refund claim. The parents got upset and Ancestry.com who acquired the free Rootsweb.com service several years ago, shut down the SSDI accessible via Rootsweb.
Rootsweb had a great feature with the SSDI where you could add notes. I added notes for every family member I found in the SSDI. Unfortunately, I learned of the death of older cousins of my parents and grandparents from the SSDI. Now, all those notes are lost and no one searching my line will find them.
Something that our tax dollars pay for should not require us to pay money to access.
Common sense when it comes to adding new laws and enforcing existing laws is sorely lacking because some people value total security over freedom.
Laws can’t keep us safe from everything. No law will stop the train near my house from ever jumping the tracks and hitting my house, for example. Preventing easy access to the records we need does not stop crime and only aggravates honest citizens interested in their family history.
Can you tell that I’m just a little aggravated by this? You can still access the records you need, there are just a lot more hoops than there need to be. Common sense tells us that laws are only obeyed by honest people. Criminals, by definition, don’t obey the law.
Too many laws are more of a hindrance to the law abiding and have no effect on criminals.
It was already illegal to obtain records under false pretenses and use them for illegal activity. Since those laws did not work, why do politicians think that adding more laws will make a difference? Simple enforcement of existing laws that don’t hinder the law abiding would be much better.
GEDCOM is an acronym for GEnealogical Data COMmunication. It is a data transmission standard developed by the LDS church, Mormons, for moving data between different genealogy programs.
It is an old standard and not maintained. There are some efforts for an new standard.
The issues with it are that it is not designed to deal with certain types of data or conclusions.
It is helpful in that it is a text file and you can make sense of it by reading it.
The best use of it is for sharing data with other researchers who are researching one or more of your family lines. It is also a good backup. If you backup your database to GEDCOM periodically and have it in a safe place, if your computer dies, you can import it into a new program without data lose. This is in addition to backing up your genealogy program’s native database format.
GEDCOM is also used for the various popular genealogy websites to upload your data to them, and you can download GEDCOMs from them.
Be careful with downloading GEDCOMs from online sources as it is up to you to verify the information in them is accurate. If you merge a gad GEDCOM into your database, you cannot “un-merge” it. This illustrates the importance of frequent and verified backups.
A verified backup is one that you have tested and know that it can be used to restore your data.
I saw this on EOGN.
Writing in The Jersey Journal, Daniel Klein describes his experiences with Ancestry.com’s member-contributed family trees. He describes the problem caused by novice genealogists using information from a reasonably reputable source (The US Census) and applying it to the wrong person. Now other people have accepted this erroneous information as gospel and it perpetuates over and over. You can read Daniel Klein’s article here.
Evernote is a very handy program that allows you to store notes online and locally. It autosyncs when there is an internet connection. You can have Evernote on your computer, laptop, tablet, phone, etc. Each device can access all the same notes. If you want, you can also share your Evernote notes with others.
Notes are organized into folders so you can keep different kinds of items separate.
I like having it on my phone for grocery lists and for things like the size of wiper blades and oil and air filters for my car, or the size of the filter for my furnace.
It is also great for use as a genealogical research log to avoid searching the same material more than once, or to plan out a research trip.
The genealogy blog, Moultrie Creek Gazette, has a great article on using Evernote for research logs using the Web Clipper browser extension. I found it thanks to Dick Eastman’s blog EOGN, http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2014/03/has-evernote-made-genealogy-research-logs-obsolete.html.
The Moultrie Creek Gazette has several other articles on using Evernote. I will have to add this to my list of genealogy blogs to follow.
Fookes Software’s NoteTab, is my favorite all-around, all-purpose program. It is billed as a programmable text editor. This means you can build scripts to handle various text editing tasks.
A text editor is plain text, like if you used a typewriter. A word processor is like Microsoft Word, or OpenOffice Writer, the user can do bold, underline, pictures, etc.
The benefits of using a text editor to do your writing is that you can focus on the content first, and the presentation later. With a word processor, there is the constant temptation to format text as you go rather than going with the flow.
NoteTab has one useful feature for taking notes called Outlines. A NoteTab outline is just a plain text file with a special formatting code in the first line so that NoteTab will show it as an outline.
I have many uses for outlines in my searches. When I am online, I can copy and paste to my outline. I have one outline I use to keep track of which people in my database I have found in the SSDI on RootsWeb. When I find someone in the SSDI, I add a post-em that explains who this person is, and their parents names, and spouse and children’s names, if all are deceased. Then even if I am no longer able to help anyone researching this line, they at least have a clue of who they are and where else to look. This also helps me organize my SSDI search as I plan which family to search for next. I copy and paste the preview of the post-em to a new outline with the name of the person for the outline heading. The preview includes the date and time, so I know when I did it. I use RootsWeb SSDI since it is free, even though it is only updated every few months. I have also learned of the death of some cousins we lost touch with, and can find their obituary online, if I check them often enough. NOTE: Due to people misunderstanding how the SSDI works most free access to it, especially via RootsWeb has been discontinued.
NoteTab’s scripting abilities also allow it to open other programs such as web pages. I built a script using NoteTab’s Clip language to give me a choice of surname, then I can select the one I want and go to the current week’s message board postings on GenForum and other sites, and see if anyone has posted anything relevant to my search. Any results can then be copied to any of the desired outlines that apply.
I have another outline that has all of the people that I know had military service. I can then review this list to see what I have found for them online, such as at the NARA Soldiers and Sailors…. (get link, etc.). I can then use this information to identify where to look when going to a library or using a service such as Ancestry.com.
I prefer to use NoteTab Pro for its versatility, but there are two other versions, NoteTab Standard, which is now included with Pro, and a free version, NoteTab Light. The free version can read outlines but cannot create new outlines without a workaround. All three versions support a PasteBoard feature. One document is designated as a PasteBoard and anything you copy goes to the paste board. One inventive NoteTab user built a clip to do a similar thing with outlines, and creates the header composed of the date and time. This clip is good if you have a lot of repetitive information you plan to copy from an electronic source, and need to keep it organized.
If you want outlines in multiple depth and with formatting, such as bold or underline, check out InSight or PowerOutlines by DataOmega. InSight has all the bells and whistles plus the kitchen sink. PowerOutlines is focused on outlines. Both products can import NoteTab outlines. PowerOutlines has the added benefit of being able to save to the NoteTab outline format, so you can view and edit the same file with either PowerOutlines or NoteTab.
As you can see, using computers in the pursuit of genealogy is more than about which genealogy program to use. A good text editor is critical. Be aware that online there are raging debates about the best text editor. I have a couple that I use, depending on my needs. Just don’t get sucked into the rabbit trail of one of these debates. Don’t waste your time on those pursuits that could better be spent breaking down walls.
Ancestry.com has made its military records collection available for free until June 6. There is a cool newsreel about the end of WWII in Europe.
This collection covers all U.S. wars, and a wide variety of records. Plan who you want to seek out and you should be able to organize your search to bear fruit. Many of these documents can hold potential clues for breaking down walls. Revolutionary and Civil War pension applications mention spouse and children, so other avenues of research can be opened. Be sure to print out what you find, if you do not become a paid member of Ancestry, so you can refer to it later.
Google has several neat searches. I discoverred last week that one can type weather: followed by the Area Code, and get a four-day weather report.
On a hunch, I tried isbn: and the ISBN number of a book, and got hits specific to that book. For example, isbn: 1556135777, will find all online references to Researcher’s Guide to United States Census Availability, 1789-1910/1920, by Ann B. Hamilton, my late mother.
I have found that Amazon.com has the ISBN number in both a 10 digit and 13 digit format. The 13 digit ISBN number started January 1, 2007, according to Wikipedia. ISBN numbers are regulated to identify the country, publisher and other information about a book. Amazon.com also has its own numbering system, ASIN, for items without an ISBN number.
Any book submitted to the Library of Congress will have an LC Classification or Call Number, and it can be located using the online catalog. The call number has a link to similar call numbers, so one can learn which books on the same surname are also in the Library of Congress.
Google also has Google Book Search. This has a feature to find books in libraries and gives an estimate in miles of the distance to that library from the search location. One can also find out if their ancestor’s names are mentioned in any of the books scanned in this massive Google project.
Having this information makes it easier to find the complete bibliographic source citation for a book or any other published work.
I recommend building up a bibliography of your genealogy library, to simplify future citations. For example, I have one collection for the books my parents published, and another collection of genealogy books by other researchers, etc.
A good bibliography building program makes this easier. I use Zotero, an add-on for the Firefox web browser. It can capture online information, but can also be used offline to edit citations, and import or export them in a variety of styles. Zotero supports citations for a wide variety of publications, and can make copies of images, and attach notes to each source. This makes it easy to create a bibliography for anything you publish.
To stay organized with your genealogy library, update your bibliography data with a new citation for each addition to your library. This will save problems with “What was that source?”, and frantic searches for a book you know you have, just to get the proper citation. In addition, add these new sources to your genealogy program as sources, so they are ready for reference.